Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Apple is becoming increasingly reliant on the production operation of former factory worker Grace Wang, women and nonbinary people in Iceland are striking, and LTK founder Amber Venz Box shares her vision for the future of ecommerce.
- Ecommerce 3.0. As the cofounder of shopping platform LTK, Amber Venz Box has a bird’s eye view into the future of ecommerce. A former stylist and personal shopper based in Dallas, she was part of the traditional retail system, helping outfit clients and receiving commissions on items sold. In 2011, she founded what is now LTK, a platform that aimed to better monetize the kind of styling work she was doing.
She then watched platforms like Shopify make it easier for anyone to sell products online without building their own infrastructure. Today she argues that we’re witnessing the birth of “ecommerce 3.0,” a new form of online commerce powered by creators and influencers.
Twelve years after its founding, LTK is now backed by Softbank and was last valued at $2 billion for its technology that allows online creators to build communities around shoppable content. The company, which earns a transaction fee on sales through the platform, says it has minted 200 millionaires and over the last 12 months has driven $4 billion in sales. Venz Box serves as the company’s president; her husband and cofounder Baxter Box is its CEO.
I joined Venz Box in Dallas earlier this month for LTK Con, the company's annual gathering of the platform’s top creators from around the world, where the company announces new features. (This year’s lineup, unsurprisingly, included AI tools to tag products and write captions.) In an onstage interview, she shared her vision for the future of ecommerce.
The creator will no longer be seen as a “link-slinger”—known only for brand collabs or referral links—but a powerful distribution point for brands and manufacturers, she argues. Just like department stores and boutiques, creators’ online stores will be destinations for shoppers to browse and buy from curated product selections.
“They hold no inventory, they ship no boxes, they do no customer care, but they have access to everything,” Venz Box told me onstage. “They’re curating the best of the web, and they’re the best marketers in the world because they have trust. That’s something you can’t compete with when it comes to selling product.”
Venz Box makes this pitch as other platforms step into ecommerce; TikTok debuted TikTok Shop last month. But Venz Box argues that social platforms can’t shake their DNA when they try to pivot to shopping. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook have evolved to become more for “entertainment” than connection; Netflix has name-checked TikTok as a competitor. “We have never been an entertainment platform, and we are still not today,” Venz Box says of LTK. LTK creators may build audiences on other platforms, but on LTK they are “actually running their businesses,” she says.
TikTok did show brands that online creators don’t need multi-million followings to be effective, she adds; with recommendations surfaced by AI, smaller creators can move product.
Of course, Venz Box sees LTK powering her vision for the future of shopping. Most of the platform's top creators are women, and most content on LTK is focused on style, lifestyle, and home décor. But the platform’s technology functions just as well for creators in sports, gaming, or other categories—a possible point of expansion for the company.
"We want creators to be their own ecommerce empires," Venz Box says. "For too long they've been renting the house—now they're actually building their own."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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